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Does early attendance to center-based childcare alter children’s intestinal microbiota? |
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Introduction
Research Question
- Does attendance to center-based childcare alter gut microbiota composition?
Motivation
Gut microbial composition plays an important role in physical and mental health.
- Animal studies suggest:
- a sensitive period in early life with regard to the influence of microbes on the host.
- that early life stress disrupts the gut microbial ecosystem with negative health consequences.
- a sensitive period in early life with regard to the influence of microbes on the host.
Entering center based childcare can be considered an early life stressor in humans that leads to prolonged increases in cortisol levels as compared to caring in the home environment.
Contribution
- To investigate whether childcare attendance is a disruptive factor for the developing microbiota.
Alpha diversity, Beta diversity and relative abundances between groups and time points PRE/POST
Data and Methods
Research Design
- Longitudinal study (BIBO Study)
- Microbiota sampling at 10 and 14 weeks of age
- Two groups: Chilcare attendance (n = 49) vs control (n = 49)
Data
- Microbial determination of three phylogenetic levels with the Human Intestinal Tract Chip (HITChip)
- Covariates: Amount of breastfeeding (number of feedings/day) and age
- Data was treated as compositional (centered-log-ratio-transformation)
Statistical Analyses:
- PCA (Aitchison distance)
- PERMANOVA (Aitchison distance)
- Hierarchical Linear Mixed Models (Gaussian family)
- Bayesian Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models (Generalized normal distribution)
- Randfom Forest Classification